The Handmaid's Tale Chapters 19-24: Questions and Answers

Chapters 19-24: Questions and Answers

Study Questions
1. The chances that Ofwarren will deliver a healthy baby are only one in four. What does this indicate about the state of the environment?

2. Since they play no real role in the birth process, why do the Wives and Handmaids all attend the birth of Ofwarren’s/Janine’s child?

3. Since the birth is a special women’s event, why are the Handmaids given inferior food to that of the Wives?

4. Offred notes that all machines that could tell the viability of a fetus have been outlawed in Gilead. What does this reveal about the society?

5. Why are the Handmaid trainees at the Center shown films of pro-choice feminist rallies after having viewed violent
pornography?

6. How could Offred have vindicated her mother?

7. If birthing babies is Gilead’s chief goal, why are the babies spoken of so callously?

8. Of all the games he could choose, why does the Commander want to play Scrabble?

9. Why does the Commander ask Offred to kiss him?

10. Why is it significant that Offred recalls a documentary featuring the mistress of a commander from the Nazi concentration camps after her “date” with the Commander of her household?

Answers
1. The low birth rate and the high infant mortality rate suggest that the environment has become increasingly toxic. Concern about pollution seems to have been another factor that lead to the Gilead revolution. Offred provides some of the details of the ecological crisis by referring to exploding atomic power plants along the San Andreas fault and a mutant strain of syphilis that could not be cured.

2. Gilead is supposed to be about “family values”—some of them, at least—and it intends to stop the decline in white births. So the birth of Janine’s child is not just a family event, but a community celebration. But Gilead segregates the sexes, giving most of its world to men, but leaving some for women. This is one of those areas.

3. Gilead is full of fraud. It claims to be Bible-based, yet it adds to or deletes from the Bible as it chooses. It also gives a very...